


Don't Keep Me Waiting

by red_at_three (elle_stone)



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Established Relationship, Humor, M/M, and some more serious conversation too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-10
Updated: 2018-10-10
Packaged: 2019-07-29 07:00:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16259057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/red_at_three
Summary: Ambassador Spock interrupts a private moment between his counterpart and Captain Kirk.“Spock, he’s almost two hundred years old. Surely he’s done enough and seen enough to be beyond caring about something like this. Besides,” he adds, pausing to pull his black shirt over his head, “you should have seen some of those memories he let through the meld. He and his Captain could get pretty wild, too. “You must speak to him” he says, taking the command gold shirt Jim still hasn’t put on, and holding it in front of him again. “Now.”Spock reacts to this statement as he does to every reference to the meld between his Captain and his counterpart: by becoming almost robotically emotionless and pretending he didn’t hear the reference at all. “





	Don't Keep Me Waiting

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was originally written back in late 2011, probably in response to a now-forgotten prompt on the st_xi_kink_meme on lj. I finished the draft, but for some reason never edited it. I've resurrected it a few times over the years but have only now polished it up and brought it to a place where I feel comfortable posting it.
> 
> Because this was written before STID or Beyond were released, it doesn't fit well with the later movie-verse canon. In particular, this fic assumes that no one but Jim and Spock would know Spock Prime's real identity (which, imo, makes more sense anyway but oh well).
> 
> This fic takes place at some unspecified time during the five-year-mission.

“I’ve been waiting for you, beautiful,” Jim says when Spock finally shows up at his door, then kisses him before he can get out a word in reply. Jim doesn’t want to hear any excuses about the experiments Spock has to monitor or the minions he has to organize. Jim has minions too—he has a whole ship of them, but he still knows how to take advantage of the rare hour they have to themselves.

“We have forty-five minutes,” he whispers into Spock’s mouth. “Take off your shirt.”

Spock complies easily enough, though he’s literal about it, and leaves his black undershirt on. But he makes sure Jim’s bare to the waist before he pushes him onto the bed. “We must not waste any time, then,” he agrees, and arches one eyebrow up in that way that he has, that way that turns Jim on every single time, and also frustrates him to no end. It’s a trick he’ll have to learn someday. For the moment he only mumbles something about how they’re finally in agreement then, and scrambles up to a better position against the pillows. 

Spock kneels over him now, everything about his posture poised and tense, but still. He takes a whole handful of their precious seconds just to look at Jim. And yet Jim will forgive him for it, easily. He loves the feel of Spock’s gaze on him, taking him in as if he were the most infinitely interesting, endless fascinating being in the universe.

Then, quite without warning, the moment breaks, and Spock’s tension with it, and he’s on top of Jim, heavy and warm over him, kissing his neck, just on the verge of leaving bites there. Running one hand down Jim’s side, finding his hand where he’s grabbed gracelessly at Spock’s hip. Entwining their fingers. While his mouth runs across Jim’s collarbone and down onto his chest, his fingers stroke across Jim’s, exploring them minutely. Jim can only try to keep himself from moaning too loudly and attempt, in his imperfect human way, to match Spock’s movements with his own.

He uses his free hand to urge Spock up again, and kisses him again, and explores that burning mouth again; he pushes his fingers through the soft hair on the back of Spock’s head and marvels at how wonderful he tastes.

Decidedly fewer than forty-five minutes have passed when he hears the door to his quarters slide open and a familiar voice say loudly, “Oh my—!”

Several things happen at once. Spock jumps off him in a quite undignified manner and tries rather unsuccessfully to look as if he had been sitting innocently on the bed the whole time. Jim sits up abruptly and instinctively grabs for a pillow to cover his chest. Then he feels stupid about it and wonders at his own modesty, and then he realizes there are bigger questions.

Lieutenant Uhura, for her part, stands completely still, with one hand over her mouth, staring. And the Ambassador just looks at them, his face as expressionless as any Vulcan’s, and his hands clasped behind his back, just as always. 

Jim and Spock break the silence at the same moment, Jim, by yelling, “Doesn’t anyone KNOCK anymore?” and Spock by saying, “Ambassador, you honor us with your presence somewhat earlier than expected.”

“Yes, my shuttle arrived earlier than I had anticipated,” he answers. His voice sounds faraway, dull and absent. “Excuse me.”

Just like that, he’s gone from the room, and his disappearance seems to snap Uhura out of her trance. She takes her hand from her mouth, sets it at her hip, and gives them both a hard glare. “Seriously,” she says, “I don’t believe either of you. What do you think you’re doing, embarrassing the Ambassador like that?”

“We’re not—he’s not—” Jim sputters in answers, and makes a few sweeping but meaningless hand gestures. But Uhura doesn’t listen, just gives them one more disapproving look and rushes from the room, probably to attempt some sort of damage control.

As soon as she’s gone, Jim throws the pillow to the floor and allows himself the full expression of his indignation. “‘Seriously,’” he repeats darkly, “and ‘what do we think we’re doing?’ As if I don’t deserve any privacy in my own quarters—and the Ambassador! Embarrassed! I doubt it!”

He continues grumbling, convincing neither himself nor Spock that his own primary emotion isn’t a fierce embarrassment of his own, and all the while, Spock himself stays silent.

They are the only two people on the ship to the know the Ambassador’s true identity (though sometimes, given his frequent visits to the Enterprise and the discerning nature of many of his crew, Jim can’t help but believe that some of them suspect) and for many months now Jim has been as equally aware of Spock’s knowledge as Spock was of Jim’s. They have even spoken of it. They have wondered about their alternate lives. They have speculated about the relationship between their counterparts, starting as it must have under such different circumstances.

“Perhaps we did offend his sense of propriety,” Spock says, now, into one of the gaps in Jim’s incoherent mumbling. He has already pulled on his blue shirt, and he proceeds to pick up both of Jim’s shirts and hand them to him.

“Spock, he’s almost two hundred years old. Surely he’s done enough and seen enough to be beyond caring about something like this. Besides,” he adds, pausing to pull his black shirt over his head, “you should have seen some of those memories he let through the meld. He and his Captain could get pretty wild, too.”

Spock reacts to this statement as he does to every reference to the meld between his Captain and his counterpart: by becoming almost robotically emotionless and pretending he didn’t hear the reference at all. “You must speak to him” he says, taking the command gold shirt Jim still hasn’t put on, and holding it in front of him again. “Now.”

“I should? Why not you? He is you, after all.”

“He is not me,” Spock corrects quickly. “And you should speak to him because you are the Captain of this vessel and it is your responsibility to smooth over such diplomatic embarrassments. Also, he is closer to you than he is to me. He would prefer to speak to you.”

Normally Jim would argue with at least one of these points, but Spock refutes all argument by shoving Jim’s shirt more insistently toward him and giving him a stare that says he will make Jim’s life miserable until he does what Spock says.

“Sometimes I wonder who’s really the Captain here,” Jim grumbles as he pulls on the shirt.

*

He finds the Ambassador in the first place he looks: the observation deck. It is the older Spock’s favorite place on the ship, as he told Jim on one of his first visits. He turns when he hears the door slide open behind him and acknowledges Jim with a nod, and then he turns back to the stars.

“I’m here to apologize, sir,” Jim starts, even though he’s not sure exactly what he is apologizing for. He stands behind the Ambassador and slightly to the side, hands behind his back, formal and contrite. “Obviously, Spock and I never intended for such a moment to be seen—”

“I understand,” the Ambassador answers, and waves his hand vaguely, as if to show there is no need at all to waste words on such a trifling thing. But still he does not turn to look at Jim, nor acknowledge him in any other way.

Jim’s not sure what to do with that.

He steps tentatively closer, side by side with the Ambassador now, and stares out at the vast expanse of space that so continually fascinates both Spocks. He considers saying something to this effect but isn’t sure it would be much help.

“I hope we didn’t offend you,” he tries again, but the Ambassador only frowns in response and says:

“Why would I find such a display offensive?”

“I’m not sure, sir, but you left so quickly that I wondered if perhaps you had.”

“I left only because I believed you wanted to be alone.”

Jim has never felt this awkward in the Ambassador’s presence before. Sometimes he is more comfortable with him than he is even with his own Spock, because he knows that this man has the benefit of years, of experience, which has mellowed some of his sharper edges. He has come to know himself and to be comfortable with himself in a way that his younger counterpart has not. Jim feels, in his presence, that there is nothing he could say or do that would be wrong, or inappropriate, or accidentally misunderstood. There is no pressure. Now, though, the Ambassador is utterly closed off, intimidating in his silence, and Jim is at a complete loss for words. 

Something like realization comes to him slowly.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” he says carefully, “do you miss your…um, your me?”

“Of course I do,” the Ambassador answers, without hesitation. His voice is wistful, though, and distant, and when he sighs, it is with a quiet reluctance to go on. “But I wonder,” he adds slowly, “if you misunderstand the nature of my history with him. Jim Kirk was a dear friend of mine. There was no one in my life more important than he. However, our relationship was never a romantic or physical one.”

Jim’s first reaction is simple surprise, and he tries his best to find words. The ones he chooses, he realizes only after he says them, when he catches the hint of embarrassment on the Ambassador’s face, are not the right ones.  

“That’s not true.”

“I can assure you it is.”

“But—” he pauses, and leans in a bit closer, as if sharing a secret. He pitches his voice low, though they are the only two there. “I don’t know if you know, but you sent me some…images, during the mind meld on Delta Vega—some rather intense images. And I mean, if that wasn’t a physical relationship, I don’t know what is.”

“Jim,” the Ambassador answers, and he sounds almost sad as he does, “surely not every image that has passed through your thoughts is a memory. Speculation, possibility…fantasy: all these things have a place in the mind as well.”

“Fantasy?” Jim repeats dumbly.

“Whatever you might have seen between my Captain and myself was purely a figment of my imagination,” the Ambassador insists.

Jim doesn’t know what to say. He wants to apologize, in that general way that people do when they hear bad news, even when they are not its cause, because it seems to him both grossly unfair and ultimately tragic that this Spock should never have had, with his Captain, in his universe, what Jim himself now has with his First.

He thinks back on some of those images, the fantasies the Ambassador let slip into his mind. Some were beautiful, some were filthy—he’d been embarrassed, even scared of them at first. Then turned on. Then jealous.

“There’s still something I don’t understand,” he says finally, and the Ambassador nods that he should speak his mind.

“There was one image that couldn’t possibly have been a fantasy. It wasn’t like the others at all. It was…a kiss. A really awkward and hesitant kiss. And you…you stopped it, I think.” 

He’s not sure if he’s allowed to talk about these things. He feels embarrassed, as if he were intruding on something that was never meant to be his. The Ambassador still won’t look at him, only gently inclines his head.

“The end of the five-year mission,” he says quietly. “The possibility that we would be separated when we returned to Earth was great. It tempted us to take risks…”

“So your feelings were requited?”

It is this, finally, that crosses a line for the Ambassador. He turns to face Jim directly and speaks with a confidence that he has recently been lacking, lost as he was in his own memories.

“Your Spock knows already what it took me a lifetime to learn: how to let go, how to allow himself to feel. I hope that you both appreciate that as a gift.”

*

“He told me that you know how to feel,” Jim tells Spock later, and watches him out of the corner of his eye for a reaction.

“I assume you corrected him on this mistaken interpretation of my character,” Spock answers.

Jim runs his fingers up Spock’s arm, his neck, along his jaw, and when he reaches his lips, Spock turns to kiss Jim’s fingers.  

“No,” Jim answers softly. “I saw no need.” 


End file.
